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Review/Film; The Camps As Not Often Seen

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Although ''Triumph of the Spirit'' is not especially graphic or brutal, it depicts aspects of the concentration-camp experience that are not ordinarily seen on film. And it serves as a reminder of why the tattoos being inflicted, the prisoners being marched to the showers, the release of the poison gas and the bodies on their way to the crematorium are not usually shown. Horror like this cannot be reduced to the level of routine fiction; the very idea of attempting as much has a profoundly trivializing effect. Events like these exist far more potently in the accounts of witnesses, in documentary footage and in our collective imagination than they ever could in melodrama.

But ''Triumph of the Spirit,'' which opens today at the Beekman theater, takes a thoroughly mundane approach to its material, an approach better suited to television films about dread afflictions than to a subject of this magnitude. Based on the story of Salamo Arouch, a young Greek boxer who survived his imprisonment at Auschwitz by fighting in bouts arranged for the entertainment of his Nazi captors, the film reduces Mr. Arouch's remarkable experience to the level of easy irony and lifeless cliche. ''Don't cry,'' says one doomed character. ''As long as we're together, it's not the end of the world.'' At the end of the film, Willem Dafoe, as Mr. Arouch, asks rhetorically, ''How can we do this to our brothers?'' and is seen walking away from Auschwitz down a long, empty road.

Mr. Dafoe, looking gaunt and exhausted, gives a harrowingly good performance here, but its impact is blunted by the film's obviousness and sentimentality. As directed by Robert M. Young, ''Triumph of the Spirit'' seldom sounds an unusual note when a familiar one will do. The young Salamo is first seen at home in Greece with his family and sweetheart; he and Allegra (Wendy Gazelle), who is in hiding, even meet secretly at a movie theater and neck innocently while ''Deutschland Uber Alles'' accompanies newsreels of Nazi triumphs. When they are all rounded up and transported to Auschwitz, Mr. Dafoe is heard in voiceover monotone saying: ''For six days and nights we traveled. People suffered and many died.''

Terrible as this is, it is also very general; the film includes few details that individualize Mr. Arouch's experience. Even the sight of Auschwitz's infamous gateway, with its sign reading ''Arbeit Macht Frei,'' manages to seem less disturbing here than it would in a documentary. A 1962 Czechoslovak film with a similar theme that played here briefly last year, Peter Solan's ''Boxer and Death,'' took a much more economical and imaginative approach to exploring what life might have been like for a prisoner boxing at the Nazis' behest. It explored the shifting, difficult relations between the fighter and his mentor; it presented the fate of his fellow prisoners as a veiled, ominous suggestion, as abandoned luggage and smoke rising from a distant chimney. ''Triumph of the Spirit'' is never that personal, and never that far from the literal-minded.

Robert Loggia gives a memorably physical performance as Mr. Arouch's hearty, stolid father, a man imprisoned beside his son until his ability to work hard finally fails him. Indeed, the separation of father and son provides one of the film's few moments of real anguish. Edward James Olmos appears to lesser effect in the under-written role of a gypsy inmate who develops a too-subtle rapport with the boxer. The film's scenes with Allegra and a friend who feigns pregnancy to get more food are much worse than those involving the men.

The film's score is outstandingly intrusive, wringing emotion at every possible moment with weepy laments and ominous choral flourishes; few events in the film occur without the kind of musical accompaniment that pre-empts the viewer's emotional response. Television routinely treats its audiences this way. Feature films of real gravity don't have to. THE MONSTROUS AS MUNDANE - TRIUMPH OF THE SPIRIT, directed by Robert M. Young; screenplay by Andrzej Krakowski and Laurence Heath, story by Shimon Arama and Zion Haen; director of photography, Curtis Clark; edited by Arthur Coburn; music by Cliff Eidelman; produced by Arnold Kopelson and Mr. Arama; released by Nova International Films. At the Beekman, Second Avenue at 66th Street. Running time: 120 minutes. This film is rated R. Salamo Arouch...Willem Dafoe Gypsy...Edward James Olmos Papa...Robert Loggia Allegra...Wendy Gazelle Elena...Kelly Wolf Avram...Costas Mandylor Jacko...Kario Salem

A version of this review appears in print on December 8, 1989, on Page C00010 of the National edition with the headline: Review/Film; The Camps As Not Often Seen. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe